Today Senator Murkowski (R-AK) used the Energy and Natural Resources Committee hearing on the Department of the Interior budget allocations as a platform to renew her demand to build a costly, dangerous and destructive road through the Izembek National Wildlife Refuge, despite the millions of taxpayer dollars that have already been used to ensure the health and welfare of citizens in the area. Her insistence on building the road even earned her a “Porker of the Month” award from Citizens Against Government Waste last spring.

Today, the National Park Service, Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW) and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) announced the official start of a public process to plan for the restoration of a grizzly bear population in Washington’s North Cascades Ecosystem.

Today, the Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) released the official annual count of endangered Mexican gray wolves tracked in the species’ recovery area in Arizona and New Mexico. Officials are celebrating this year, because for the first time since recovery efforts began in 1998, the population has surpassed 100 individuals. However, conservationists say that while the increase from 83 wolves at the end of 2013 to this year’s 109 wolves is good, numbers alone won’t save this imperiled wolf, especially with the serious limitations and flaws in the Service’s newly released Mexican gray wolf management rule.

Wildlife conservation groups and tribes today expressed concern about a new bill in the state legislature that would hand control of state bison management to county politicians. The groups cite concerns that wildlife biologists would be replaced by politicians as the decision-makers for wild bison management and that the bill would create a patchwork of inconsistent laws that would wreak havoc on wild bison restoration in Montana.

Two separate pieces of legislation to eliminate federal protections for wolves in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan and Wyoming were introduced in Congress this week. These two pieces of legislation, the first sponsored by Representative Kline (R-MN) focused on removing protections in the Great Lakes states, and the second by Representatives Ribble (R-WI) and Lummis (R-WY) that would encompass the Great Lakes and Wyoming both, come just a few months after courts set aside rules that delisted wolves in those regions, keeping wolves protected under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA).

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (Service) today confirmed through DNA analysis that the endangered gray wolf shot dead in Utah was indeed the lone female recently made famous for her journey of hundreds of miles from the Northern Rockies to the Grand Canyon. The wandering wolf was killed earlier this month by a hunter who reportedly mistook her for a coyote.

The pallid sturgeon, a critically endangered North American fish with ancestors dating back to the time of dinosaurs, may die out in a few years without access to prime spawning habitat if river dam operations in the upper Missouri River are not changed. Today, conservation groups filed a lawsuit against three federal agencies, demanding that the agencies fix their dam operations that threaten the existence of wild pallid sturgeon.

Today the Senate rejected an amendment that would have removed federal protections for the lesser prairie chicken, an iconic grassland grouse whose population recently plummeted leading to a 2014 threatened listing under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Senator Moran of Kansas introduced the amendment which would have immediately and permanently delisted the imperiled birds, jeopardizing conservation and recovery of the species.